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Whenever the topic of establishing a base on Mars comes up [1], a frequent response from environmentalists and scientists is: how about we save Earth instead?

This was the subject of a recent post by Tanya Samman and Alina Fisher for Science Borealis. They make a number of good points: in particular, a stark look at the technical hurdles, as well as an introduction of some difficult ethical problems. Still, I had to respond with some objections: Earth vs Mars is a false dichotomy. Technical solutions could potentially get us to Mars, but solving climate change is more than a technical issue. Becoming a multiplanetary species offers unique protection against certain existential risks.

I could happily go on, but that’s not the purpose of this post. This post is meant to introduce my over the top radical plan that shows not just how awesome it could be to go to Mars, but how it could save the Earth at the same time.

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First, we create many Mars design challenges, baked into the curriculum at every level, from middle school through university. This would include everything from habitat design to waste recycling to landing sites to large-scale terraforming logistics to social structures and programs. The winners of each stage of the contest will see their ideas advance, perhaps all the way into the actual operation on Mars.

This will ensure the talent pool is as large as possible. We need to get ideas from everyone on the planet. In addition, their input has to mean something. Not just in terms of the design challenge having real stakes, but in terms of having a participatory process that gets all humanity to actually be invested in getting to Mars.

So far, we’ve only talked about Mars. What about the Earth? The first answer is technical spinoffs. All of the innovation required to build a successful mars base would give us technologies we don’t currently have – in energy use, miniaturization, robotics, and other areas.

Unfortunately, that answer is limited and boring. You’ve heard it before. It’s also highly uncertain; while it might bring huge technical transformation, it seems like the benefits to Earth are unlikely to justify the cost.

That’s why it’s just part of the puzzle. The other pieces are the concern for Earth it can engender, and the training of skilled scientists with the resources to tackle Earth’s problems.

Astronauts who have been to space report a cognitive shift in awareness, seeing the Earth as a fragile ball of life “hanging in the void”. This phenomenon is called the Overview Effect [2]. While it’s most known from astronauts’ experiences, and from a few photographs (“Earthrise” and “Pale Blue Dot”), the hope is that working seriously on the challenges of supporting life in space and on Mars would engender some of this same cognitive shift. The program would be a major success if even a fairly small fraction of students carry this ethos into future lives in politics, business, or other sectors of society.

This inspiration can’t be allowed to burn in isolation, or it will fizzle out. A full range of naturalists and scientists of all kinds – biologists, ecologists, geologists, taxonomists, ecological economists, rocket scientists, surgeons, wastewater engineers, structural engineers, roboticists, sociologists, urban planners, and others – should form part of the support network not only for the Mars design challenge, but to support and guide students afterwards. A steady influx of motivated students to teach, along with two major, urgent projects that use their knowledge (i.e. getting to Mars and saving Earth), should help provide a fruitful direction for these skilled professionals. As it stands, too many of them are struck trying to ineffectually raise the alarm and influence an uncaring society that continues to burn through the Earth’s resources and capacity for resilience.

These pillars – universal, fully participatory Mars design challenges, technological spinoffs, judicious harnessing of the overview effect, and a well-developed pipeline for talent – form the basis of a Mars strategy that can save the Earth at the same time.

But we can go much, much further. Nothing so far has been particularly radical, in my view. It’s time to introduce the craziest fact I know.

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Here is the craziest fact I know:

A trip to space produces less carbon emissions than a flight across the Atlantic. [3] [4]

 

What are we to do with this fact? Well, the obvious. Ban (or almost totally eradicate) air travel. And give every teenager a free ride to space.

Though it sounds radical, air travel is actually a pretty good sector to target if we’re serious about climate change. If you’ve ever used a carbon footprint calculator, you will know that a single trip can easily dwarf your emissions from other sources. And collectively, we’re flying more and more.  Based on current trends, aviation alone is projected to account for all or nearly all of the planet’s emissions budget by 2050 [5]. Various schemes to reduce the amount we fly are already being considered: eliminating frequent flyer rewards, ensuring universal (interjurisdictional) fuel taxes, and promoting teleconferencing instead of travel.

Personally, I think we can go much further. Virtual Reality is getting good. When it fully arrives, it will be hugely disruptive in a number of industries, and aviation should be one of them. Virtual reality could cut down on travel for conferences, business meetings, and even family time. While we’re at it, we could invest much more into trains (especially in North America). Going back to passenger travel by ship could be a necessity. Yes, it’s a much rougher voyage, and it takes much longer. But maybe it should involve some inconvenience to get halfway around the world, if we still want there to be a world left. Who knows, maybe we could use the time to learn something about the language and culture of our destination, instead of passing the time with Hollywood movies from five years ago.

Decommissioned airports could be turned into spaceports. If the plan to get to Mars involves orbital refueling (which seems likely, since barring a space elevator, this is probably the best way to beat the tyranny of the rocket equation), then it will be necessary to have a lot of active spaceports – for capacity and weather issues, if nothing else. And if we have all these rockets going to orbit and back, and all these kids who have been studying Mars systems, couldn’t we…let the kids ride on the rockets?

This trip to space could serve as a culmination of the time spent on the Mars design project. It could fill an important psychological role as a rite of passage into adulthood. We could end voluntourism, and wealthy kids’ trips to Europe or various tropical locales. Instead, give all kids a chance to see Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica. The oceans. New Zealand, and Greenland, less than 20 minutes apart. See both auroras. Watch day and night chase each other around the planet. See the distant stars, and the cosmos.

Of course, there are a ton of issues involved. First of all safety, but also accessibility of all kinds. It would certainly be expensive, but the truly mind-boggling thing is that ­in terms of the real cost – the cost to the planet – it would be much cheaper than what we’re currently doing. We spend inordinate amounts of energy and money shuttling ourselves back and forth across the surface. Harnessing that together could get us a very long way.

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In the NatGeo article I linked above, astronaut Karen Nyberg said “If I could get every Earthling to do one circle of the Earth, I think things would run a little differently.” I don’t know if anyone until now has considered that this might actually be possible – and cheaper than business as usual.

It will take much more than a series of joyrides to motivate systemic action in caring for the Earth. No matter what miraculous cognitive shifts may occur, this isn’t Uber for orbit. The Mars design challenges – especially their participatory nature – and talent development system, though much less sexy, are crucial to the functioning of this plan.

Discussions of “protecting Earth vs head to Mars” often echo the rhetoric of “put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others.” The problem is that, for the Earth, we don’t really even have an oxygen mask – and we certainly don’t have a way to get everyone to agree to it. Yelling ourselves hoarse doesn’t work. We need technical problem solving, but more importantly we need a full cognitive shift – like the overview effect that comes from a trip to orbit. With some luck, we can change our outlook to one that encompasses all of humanity, and considers the inhospitable Martian environment as our antagonist, instead of one another.

Life on Earth is meaningful for many reasons, but one of them is that we’re constantly looking outwards into the universe. Life in space is often bleak and empty – but finds meaning when we turn our gaze back to Earth. This is the story of Earthrise, and the Pale Blue Dot [6]. More recently, it’s the story of high-quality satellite imaging and the InSight lander’s seismic mission on Mars. It could be the story of a Mars base too.

We are wrecking our planet. Some drastic intervention is necessary, and it’s understandable to have a strong reaction against riding flamboyantly into the sunset. But a well-crafted Mars plan may be key to saving Earth. We claim to be a space-age civilization, but many of our biggest accomplishments in that domain are decades behind us, and down here we’re still worsening many of our same old problems. One thing we can agree on: kids are the future. I believe we will truly be a space-age civilization when those kids are tagging along a Mars vehicle refuelling mission at 28000 kilometers an hour, on the cusp of adulthood, staring out at the stars and pondering the problems of two worlds.

 

If I get around to it, and depending on the response, I might like to do a Part II. This would cover more of the social and moral questions — who goes to Mars, how do we pick, how do we avoid repeating structural problems on Earth, who pays for it, should we extricate this from SpaceX/private enterprise, and how?

[1] I want to avoid the phrase “Mars colonization” because of the terrible parallels it invokes. I hope this can be part of a broader language shift

[2] A longer article like this one can convey much more emotional depth than the Wikipedia page. To my slight dismay, it never once mentions the term “overview effect”.

[3] Source: https://twitter.com/astro_alex/status/994150261315731456?lang=en

Some explanation of how this could be: a rocket engine is much larger and burns much more fuel, but it’s only switched on for a couple of minutes. By comparison, the plane’s engines are burning for several hours.

[4] See this post for similar calculations. Even if this claim turns out to be incorrect, it shouldn’t be by more than on order of magnitude or so, which is all we need, as you will see.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation

[6] Carl Sagan understood this very well. It’s not only the Pale Blue Dot photograph, but also the Golden Record and basically his entire public career.

I just published a letter in Nature.

Well, a letter only in the colloquial sense. More properly, it’s correspondence. It can be seen here. It reads:

Lifetime word limits would unleash woe

If science’s current predicament has taught us one thing, it is that we should beware of perverse incentives (see M. Edwards and S. Roy Environ. Eng. Sci. 34, 51–61; 2017). So let us imagine the cascade of woe that could follow from Brian Martinson’s thought experiment of allocating scientists a lifetime word limit (Nature 550, 303; 2017).

Papers could become shorter and more obtuse, with content moved to appendices. ‘Pre-prints’ might never be published and instead would be squirrelled away on personal websites — dodging peer review. A new type of predatory journal that falsified word limits could stoke demand and become pervasive. Research collaborations would decline.

Supervisors would leave their names off papers, relying on the force of association to boost their reputation. And, graduate students could have their lifetime word limits exploited, particularly if they do not continue with an academic career (see Nature 550, 429; 2017).

As my colleague and mentor Sarah Boon said about her own ‘non-traditional’ piece in Nature, “it’s a relatively short piece that looks deceptively easy to write.” I suspect I had an easier time of it than Sarah, since I had no need for interviews, and the editor’s role in this section is closer to gatekeeping than overhauling.  Nonetheless, there’s a lot that went on behind the scenes, some lessons to learn, and some questions raised. This piece owes a lot to Sarah’s — not only the obvious similarities, but the well-timed publication of her piece is part of what inspired me to submit my letter in the first place.

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This letter started life as an angry rant. First on facebook, then slightly tidied up and copied onto my blog. Here’s the first lesson: angry rants don’t have to stay on facebook. If you have something to say about a scientific publication, write to the publisher! This is particularly true if you’re a junior researcher, and if you can easily substantiate your claims.

To change my angry blog post into a reasonably argued letter took me a couple of hours. Much of that was spent looking up the requirements – finding DOIs and formatting citations, and wishing I could publish in the same ‘World View’ column as the original. To be honest, I’m not sure what’s up with that column. Yes, it’s important to have a venue for opinion pieces, but it appears to be averse to citations even where they would be appropriate, and the editorial process is very opaque.

In any case, my original letter rang in at close to 300 words, instead of 150 for the final version. I won’t reproduce the entire text, since the content is fairly close to the blog post, though the tone is not. In particular, it included a paragraph about the utter infeasibility of implementing a word limits system, and a concluding statement encouraging both creative thinking and a healthy fear of unintended consequences.

Here, we come to the second lesson: let it go. When the tentative approval came back, the whole section about feasibility had been cut. And it was better without it. It was shorter and less aggressive, and in any case the feasibility of a thought experiment doesn’t matter as much as its unintended consequences.

I was somewhat amused by our email chain back and forth. The editor addressed me as “Dr.”, even though I am not. I addressed her as “Dr.” – because, even though she did not include it in her email signature, a quick google search confirmed that she was. I wondered how many people didn’t, and I was conscious of the usefulness of “Dr.” as a form of address that is both genderless and unrelated to marital status. (Lesson #0: treat people with respect.)

There were a couple of other points in our editorial back-and-forth. The phrase “cascade of woe”, and the title, are hers. It’s not a word I would have thought to use, but I quite like it. I had pushed for “would” in a couple of places that now read “could”, and I had wanted to include a closing sentence about the need for more creative solutions. Most importantly, I had wanted to use the phrase “disposable grad student husks”, which so many people liked in my earlier drafts. Sadly, this was not to be.

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My biggest unresolved question: how serious was the original suggestion? The first response I received said “This shortening has been achieved by making the tone more satirical, in the spirit of the original article.” So…was it a satire all along, and did I miss the joke? My response is “if it was a joke and I missed it, then others must have missed it too.” But this is somewhat self-serving, since I wanted to publish.

My best answer is that the suggestion of lifetime word limits was a serious idea somewhere between a thought experiment and a fantasy, which was written in a satirical tone. I say that it had a component of fantasy because I think that if Martinson had treated it as a serious thought experiment, he would have come up with some of the same issues as I did. He has a fairly substantial career in research integrity; this leads me to think that either he knows something I don’t, he’s frustrated enough to propose his perfect-world solution without thinking of undesirable consequences, or he just wanted to throw it out for fun.

The semi-serious nature of this topic is illustrated in another response, advocating cap-and-trade for word limits. This author suggests auctioning researchers’ love of verbiage such as “it is easily shown that …” as a fundraiser.

I will admit that this correspondence was partially published with the goal of getting my own name out there. That seems important, if I want to situate myself in the field of studying and improving the scientific process. But this publication is also worthwhile to the broader community. I saw a decent amount of uncritical coverage of the original piece, including on Retraction Watch. I think that record is worth correcting.

This brief letter also helped me develop my ideas. In particular, I think that as a bare minimum, creative ideas to improve the scientific process should be feasible, and shouldn’t create more problems than they solve. This sounds simple, but is quite a tough requirement. Feasibility means among other things that it should be scalable and not require a system-wide overhaul. Attempting to assess the consequences of theoretical ideas is often quite tough, but should consider existing power structures & axes of marginalization, subtle systemic pressures, and malicious compliance.

I look forward to further developing these ideas in future posts or publications. In the meantime, I have a piece in Nature, and only spent 150 words.

This is really just a hasty screed copied over from facebook, which I thought I might keep in a slightly more permanent place.

It’s based on this opinion piece in Nature: Give researchers a lifetime word limit.

It starts with a good observation (though at this point it’s a fairly widely held belief):

The purpose of authorship has shifted. Once, its primary role was to share knowledge. Now it is to get a publication — ‘pubcoin’ if you will. Authorship has become a valuable commodity. And as with all valuable commodities, it is bought, sold, traded and stolen.

The proposed “solution” — a lifetime word limit per author, would, according to the author, have the following miraculous effects:

“Lifetime limits would create a natural incentive to do research that matters.”
“It would also lead to increased value being placed on concision and clarity, improving readability and efficiency.”
“Predatory publishers would vanish.”
“The task of evaluating candidates for jobs, advancement and prizes would become less scattershot.”

No. Have we learned nothing from communism? If you think that it’s a problem that something has been commodified, putting a hard cap on it is *not* a solution. I’ll get to the tremendous implementation difficulties later. For now, let’s see some ways your great idea would backfire due to the terrible incentives it creates.

Papers would become shorter and more obtuse, with more of the content shoved into appendices, “pre-prints”, personal websites, and anywhere else that doesn’t count.
Honourary authorship would become less attractive — but a shadow “authorship” would emerge, of (e.g.) grad students leaving off their supervisors, but still making it known as “their” work.
Many of these grad students, who aren’t going to get academic jobs anyway, would just be disposable husks used up for their word count.
Researchers would face new anxiety about whether their current topic was “important enough”.

I think the deeply unethical disposable-grad-student-husks should alone be enough to stop it. But perhaps that’s naive; it certainly doesn’t seem to have stopped our current system. The big point is this would not help science.

The implementation side is also, shall we say, nontrivial.

It’s technically easy (ish) to require all authors to have ORCIDs, and tally everyone’s word count. But that’s the only easy part.

You’d have to get all journals to agree to this system. Getting all journals to agree on anything is more or less impossible. Even if you did in your fantasy world, you’d have a new type of predatory publisher: those that faked compliance with this system.

And what happens with a submission that’s over someone’s lifetime word count? Is it auto-rejected? Or does that author just get dropped?

What happens when a faculty candidate is near their lifetime word limit? Are they automatically rejected?

What happens when a recognized authority is no longer allowed to publish — both for their own career, and for the field?

How is it phased in? Does it only apply to publications from this day forward, and hence disproportionately hit younger researchers? Or does it force a large cohort of senior academics into immediate retirement?

Who sets these word limits anyway? The author acknowledges “Some subjects and pursuits might be inherently wordier than others.”

But then he undermines that with “Exceptions might have to be made for experts such as statisticians and bioinformaticians whose skills are required on many papers — but perhaps this would boost the quality of collaborations. Perhaps researchers could apply for word bonuses for careful reproductions, cautious interpretations and meticulously described methods.” Noooooo! This just commodifies the bureaucratic filing of appeals.

Lifetime word limits do not help science, and it’s bad enough that I can’t see a way to make it work. It’s lucky that this can’t get off the ground. But for next time: please, please think about perverse incentives before proposing brilliant new solutions.

 

This experience happened over a year ago, but oh well. Our current snowscapes reminded me of it.
I was walking through a parking lot, in the winter, when there were little clumps of partly-frozen snow on the ground. I kicked one accidentally. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it bouncing along on the ground.
Something seemed strange. I looked again. It was kind of floating along higher than it should be. I mean snow is light, and there was a bit of wind, but not that much. I hadn’t kicked it hard at all – just a nudge. It skidded along the ground a couple of times. No little bits of it fell off. That was strange.
Then it clicked. This wasn’t snow – it was a piece of Styrofoam.

Now for everyone’s favourite part – the moral of the story. This was a cool experience of refactored perception – the lower level PHYSICS SIMUALTOR module was doing some calculations, which resulted in an error message when run on the input “snow” from the higher-level OBJECT IDENTIFICATION module. Fortunately, changing the contents of this module resolved the error without system failure. The whole episode was a visceral & fun way to be wrong.